Pokémon Go: Marketing Implications for Mobile Video Game

2017 ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Terry Wu
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Mobile Video ◽  
Pokémon Go

scholarly journals The Gengar effect: Excessive Pokémon Go players report stronger smartphone addiction, phubbing, pain, and vision-related problems

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lukasz D. Kaczmarek ◽  
Maciej Behnke ◽  
Marzena Dżon
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Smartphone Addiction ◽  
Mobile Video ◽  
Eye Problems ◽  
Mental Problems ◽  
Pokémon Go ◽  
Electronic Media Use ◽  
Physical Symptomatology

Individuals usually benefit from Pokémon Go gaming because this mobile video game provides an attractive opportunity for increased outdoor physical activity and socializing. However, based on prior studies on gaming and electronic media use, excessive Pokémon Go involvement is likely to be related to adverse phenomena such as mental problems (smartphone addiction and phubbing), pain (in neck, arms, and legs), and eye-related problems (dry eye and impaired focusing). We expected that excessive Pokémon Go players would exhibit stronger mental and physical symptomatology. Pokémon Go players (N = 450) completed an online survey reporting Pokémon Go addiction symptoms, smartphone addiction symptoms, phubbing habits, time spent playing Pokémon Go, pain, and eye problems. We also controlled for overall use of other electronic media. We found that individuals with higher levels of Pokémon Go addiction reported more pain and more problems with vision. Increased smartphone addiction and phubbing partially mediated these effects. This study contributes to a balanced perspective on the biopsychosocial outcomes of health behaviors gamification via mobile video games.

Frustration and Violence in Mobile Video Games

2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-70
Author(s):  
Petr Květon ◽  
Martin Jelínek
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Implicit Association Test ◽  
Self Determination Theory ◽  
Psychological Needs ◽  
Basic Psychological Needs ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Mobile Video ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
Before And After

Abstract. This study tests two competing hypotheses, one based on the general aggression model (GAM), the other on the self-determination theory (SDT). GAM suggests that the crucial factor in video games leading to increased aggressiveness is their violent content; SDT contends that gaming is associated with aggression because of the frustration of basic psychological needs. We used a 2×2 between-subject experimental design with a sample of 128 undergraduates. We assigned each participant randomly to one experimental condition defined by a particular video game, using four mobile video games differing in the degree of violence and in the level of their frustration-invoking gameplay. Aggressiveness was measured using the implicit association test (IAT), administered before and after the playing of a video game. We found no evidence of an association between implicit aggressiveness and violent content or frustrating gameplay.

Along the Lines of the Occupation

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Cristiano ◽  
Emilio Distretti
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Green Line ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Pokémon Go ◽  
East Jerusalem

Augmented reality enables video game experiences that are increasingly immersive. For its focus on walking and exploration, Niantic’s location-based video game Pokémon Go (PG) has been praised for allowing players to foster their understanding and relationship to surrounding spaces. However, in contexts where space and movement are objects of conflicting narratives and restrictive policies on mobility, playing relies on the creation of partial imaginaries and limits to the exploratory experience. Departing from avant-garde conceptualizations of walking, this article explores the imaginary that PG creates in occupied East Jerusalem. Based on observations collected in various gaming sessions along the Green Line, it analyzes how PG’s virtual representation of Jerusalem legitimizes a status quo of separation and segregation. In so doing, this article argues that, instead of enabling an experience of augmented reality for its users, playing PG in East Jerusalem produces a diminished one.

Pokémon Go as a cognitive map: Simplifying and focusing movement in postmodern urban spaces

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-194
Author(s):  
Charles Soukup
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Local Community ◽  
World View ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Pokémon Go

The location-based, augmented reality video game Pokémon Go has been an unprecedented phenomenon in the short history of mobile smartphone applications. In this article, I argue that the remarkable success of Pokémon Go derives from its cognitive mapping qualities within postmodern, hyper-mediated environments. By focusing and filtering the vast information associated with navigating postmodern spaces, Pokémon Go provides individuals with greater clarity by defining the subject’s social identity in relationship to the physical environment. In particular, the game recentres the fragmented subject’s disorienting experiences associated with postmodern cultures immersed in digital information. Via its integration of location-based gaming, rudimentary augmented reality, simple mobile game design and collaborative local community-based game-play, Pokémon Go allows the individual to move about the complex urban environment with great confidence, purpose and clarity ‐ the search for Pokémon frames the player’s objectives and attention (literally via the smartphone screen). Drawing upon the media ecology tradition, the contemporary world-view or media logic of ubiquitous digital media is dominated by quantification, clear game-like rules, and the ‘productive’ collection and management of information.

scholarly journals Designing a Mobile Video Game to Help Young Deaf Children Learn Auslan

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Korte ◽  
Leigh Ellen Potter ◽  
Sue Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Mobile Video

Playing at apocalypse: Reading Plague Inc. in pandemic culture

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 587-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Mitchell ◽  
Sheryl N Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Mobile Video ◽  
Social Relevance

Plague Inc. is an enduringly popular mobile video game in which players create diseases and attempt to eradicate humanity; it has been downloaded more than 60 million times and been met with largely positive critical reception, with many reviews praising the game as a ‘realistic outbreak simulator’. This article explores Plague Inc. as both an artifact, and productive, of ‘pandemic culture’, a social imaginary that describes how the threat of pandemic increasingly shapes our day-to-day life. Ludic and narrative elements of the game were identified and selected for analysis, along with paratexts surrounding the game. Three aspects of Plague Inc. were used to structure the analysis: its politics of global scale, its viral realism, and its visual culture of contagion. The article examines how the ways in which Plague Inc. articulates ideas about pandemic may not only explain the game’s immense success but also provide insights into public perceptions and popular discourses about disease threats. The article argues that the game is an incomplete text that depends on preexisting familiarity with other disease media. It concludes that the popularity and longevity of Plague Inc., as well as its broader social relevance, can be explained by placing it within the context of public anxieties about vulnerability to infectious diseases.

scholarly journals What does <i>Pokémon Go</i> teach us about geography?

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huiwen Gong ◽  
Robert Hassink ◽  
Gunnar Maus
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Real ◽  
Pokémon Go

Abstract. Pokémon Go, a highly popular, recently launched augmented-reality-based video game, fosters players' interaction with the real world. In this commentary we elaborate on how location-based games, such as Pokémon Go, have provided insights into the perception and understanding of space, as well as into their impact on patterns of mobility. In addition to that, we compare Pokémon Go with geocaching, another location-based game, to further elaborate on what Pokémon Go fails to do in terms of the practices of geographical exploration.

Mobile Frontiers

The Race Card ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 138-174
Author(s):  
Tara Fickle
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
The Self ◽  
Linguistic Feature ◽  
Mobile Game ◽  
Gps Technology ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Pokémon Go ◽  
Game Developers

This chapter uses the mobile game Pokémon GO as a case study of how video game developers have successfully harnessed the self-centering power of ludo-Orientalism, using augmented reality and GPS technology to construct virtual spaces ripe for playful exploration as well as economic exploitation. In focusing on Nintendo’s sophisticated marketing and aesthetic strategies to erase all signs of Japanese “cultural odor” from its games, scholarly appraisals of the Pokémon franchise have largely followed the traditional reduction of race to an explicit visual or linguistic feature of games. This chapter instead uses Pokémon GO’s seemingly inadvertent exposure of U.S. racial fault lines as an opportunity to explore how race is not erased but rather embedded in the game’s disorienting technology. It reveals the unacknowledged legacy of Japanese racial ideologies, imperialist ambitions, and atomic history that lurk beneath the game screen. The chapter argues that this illusion of ahistorical universality crucially buttresses the fantasy of Pokémon GO as a truly “free” game, masking the invasive and dehumanizing data mining structures that make it enormously profitable for its developers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document